BlizzCon 2013 – Diablo III: Reaper of Souls Preview Panel Transcript

And end-game for everyone, like Josh mentioned, not only is Adventure Mode an end-game, it is also somewhere where you can level up your character. So we have this awesome new campaign in Act V; but you don’t have to play that in order to get to the Adventure Mode. Adventure Mode is a new mode.

You can play where you want to. So a lot of you are probably familiar with this request; because you made it yourself. Why don’t we just unlock all the waypoints?

So we went way beyond that, so this is a new map of Act III, you can go to any Acts. You can go to any waypoint in it at any time. You can jump all over the game, up to and including Act V.

So Adventure Mode, again, is a separate mode from the campaign mode. That said, we have taken all of our favorite moment from the campaign, all those story battles that you enjoyed. All the little side scenes, all the events, and random parts, as well, and we combined them together into the Adventure Mode.

So the story, essentially the quests, just gets out of the way; but it’s still pretty playable. Your character can go back and forth between the modes at any time. So the two features that adventure mode bows down to — the way we deliver this to you is our Bounties and Nephalem Rifts. These are sub-features of the Adventure Mode.

Bounties are essentially very simple. These are the tour guide of the world. You now can go anywhere. Bounties are the way we suggest where you should go.

So Stephen is gonna go through this in a lot more details in just a moment, but essentially all our favorite parts of the game are given to you and its a rewarding way to play. Variety has become the most rewarding way to play.

And the Nephalem Rifts. Nephalem Rifts are that promise of that randomization that we do, all those tilesets, all these monsters, all these technical systems to make this game as replayable as possible. This is, that replayability rip on an epic scale. This particular example here’s Act IV and Act III monsters fighting together in Whimsyshire, notice, the rainbows and everything.

I love to call it Grimsyhire because it’s dark and it’s night. Ahhh, no one laugh at that at the office either.

(Audience laughs)

This particular image shows also that we’ve also got the random weather and lighting everywhere, as well, and that includes the hubs, as well, you get to see Caldeum at night and other areas, too. So that might seem like a minor thing from a “feature” point of view; but it does make everything feel better as well. So we are going into a lot of more details on “Bounties”, here’s Stephen Wong.

(Audience Applauses)

So… as Kevin just mentioned to you, we opened up the world and we opened up all Acts and all Waypoints at once; but it wasn’t quite enough..

When we are playing with it, internally we had some problems. In single-player, some people wanted to have a little bit more guidance. They are overwhelmed by all the different options that are now available to them. And in multiplayer, a lot of times the party will get separated because there wasn’t any one goal keeping the party together. So we have four different players each on a different corner of the world.

So what we decided to do was Bounties. And the bounties are random quests that are given to you at the start of the game and it takes place in all five Acts. And they take advantage of all of the different contents that is inside of Diablo III and the Reaper of Souls. Bounties will take you through all the bosses, all the events, all the side dungeons everything that we have put into the game now we put a focus on that with bounties and adventure mode. So at the start of an adventure mode game, you get 25 random bounties – five in each Act, and you can go and complete.

Now we are not putting the game in realms. You can still do everything else inside the adventure mode, you can go wherever you want to; but you hop into this, then you can go and do these bounties and collect your rewards afterwards.

So let’s take a look at some of the different Bounty types we have. So the first bounties types –killing a boss, right?

So we take our all 15 Act bosses that are in Diablo III and Reaper of Souls and we made a bounty for each one; and in this example you gonna go kill Queen Araneae in Spider Caves. So you will find the entrance to the Spider Caves, go inside. Slay away through to the Queen’s Chamber and destroy her and you will collect your reward.

The next type of bounty that we have is cleaning an event and in this example, it is in the Festering Woods, and you’ll go and complete the “Last Stand of the Ancients” quest. This is inside of the Festering Woods, and complete your reward.

And this puts the spotlight on a lot of different events that we have in the game, that might be a little bit out of the way of normal gameplay; but now with the bounty quest form, you’ll go and find them and do them, you got a lot of diversity matter into this game.

Our third type of bounty is killing a unique monster, an in this example, we have a bounty for killing Mira Eamon the blacksmith’s undead wife; and you might remember her from the story mode, where you’ll go into the blacksmith’s cellar and take care of her because the blacksmith needs you to do this, and that’s how you down the story in the game.

What we have done in adventure mode is we moved her out of the cellar into the random distribution of the Festering Woods, and you will go out explore, find her and kill her; and you will collect your reward after that.

And what we have done is, we have taken a lot of uniques that are in the game, uniques like Mira or Jondar; and we put them into random distribution and they are now bounty targets.

Our last kind of bounty is clearing a dungeon, and this is our version of Diablo II’s Den of Evil, and in this example you go to Khazara Den and kill the enemies, and you lay away all the things and you will collect your reward afterwards. And with this kind of bounty what we do is taking you through all the different kind of side dungeons that we have, and again maybe not all are in the game right now, but because it is a bounty you gotta do them and you know you gonna experience all that content we have built for you.

So we have mentioned “Rewards” a lot, and let’s take a look at what you are going to get when doing bounties.

So you gonna get total experience, of course, and we wanna make it worthwhile for you to doing these things, alright like it should be, you know pretty good reward for you doing bounties right? And you also gonna get access to powerful items and lastly you gonna get Rift Keystones and to talk about what Rift Keystones are and what they open, here’s Jesse Maccree (senior level designer).